Menu

Miso Katsu

When in Japan, one of my favourite things to eat is the tonkatsu: a fried breaded pork cutlet. On it’s own, it’s quite tasty: we’ve eaten quite a few times in the KYK tonkatsu restaurant at Kyoto station. They serve the tonkatsu with miso soup, rice and cabbage — and you can get free refills of those three too. But it also makes a perfect set-piece for a more complex meal, like the katsudon (tonkatsu gratinated with an egg on top of rice) or katsu-curry (tonkatsu with rice and the Japanese-style curry) — all very tasty!

Last time we were in Japan, we had lunch at a tonkatsu place. Their speciality was miso katsu: a tonkatsu with a special miso sauce. I really like the taste of miso, so I took a chance. It was amazingly good! The rich miso taste really complements the taste of the tonkatsu very nicely, and I was an instant fan.

So when we were making our menu, I looked up a recipe for miso katsu, and I found one — and it’s quite simple, and we had everything needed in our cupboards! We did ‘cheat’ and got a wiener schnitzel instead of making our own tonkatsu. We used white miso the first time, but for the second time I used red miso, and the taste was even better!
It’s quite salty though, because of the dashi stock that has to be reduced. Maybe if we make a larger batch, we can reduce the amount of dashi.

The miso sauce is spread all over the schnitzel, and it was amazing! We ate it with vegetable fries (carrot and parsnip) and pickles (daikon and cucumber). Definitely something we’ll be eating more often!